Daniel A. Abrams
Academic Appointments
- Postdoctoral Research fellow, Psychiatry & Behavioral Science
Key Documents
Contact Information
- Academic Offices
Personal Information Email
Professional Overview
Honors and Awards
- Postdoctoral National Research Service Award, NIH/NIDCD (2010-2012)
- Independence Blue Cross Grant in Auditory Science Award, National Organization for Hearing Research Foundation (2006)
- Research Training in Neuroscience, NIH/NIDCD (2002-2003)
- Graduate Fellowship, Northwestern University (2000-2001)
Professional Education
| B.F.A.: | University of Arizona (1994) |
| Doctor of Philosophy: | Northwestern University (2008) |
Stanford Advisors
| Vinod Menon: | Postdoctoral Faculty Sponsor |
Lab Affiliations
Scientific Focus
Current Research Interests
Language impairments affect up to 19% of school age children and these deficits are predictive of long-term problems affecting learning, academic achievement, and behavior. My primary research goal is to understand the neurobiological foundations of language impairments. Specifically, I am interested in how the perception and neural coding of speech impact language and other behavioral deficits in children, with a focus on children with reading disabilities (RD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The theoretical framework that motivates my work is that impaired perception and neural decoding of speech are causally related to language deficits in many affected children. Moreover, I believe that a grasp of these relationships is central to understanding the etiology of these disorders and will provide insight into their remediation.
Temporal Features of Speech in the Reading-Impaired Auditory System: Speech contains a number of temporal features that are important for perception. Some of these temporal features are relatively slow, such patterns of syllables in speech, and some features are much faster and enable us to discriminate the word gab from dab. My dissertation work was the first to show that cortical processing of syllable patterns is related to phonological and reading impairments in children with reading disorders. Additionally, this work identified a relationship between brainstem and leftward cortical asymmetry for processing rapid elements of speech in both normal and reading-impaired children. A fundamental question raised by my dissertation work is why does the auditory system preferentially route slow speech features to right-hemisphere auditory cortex and rapid features to left-hemisphere? A plausible explanation is that lateralized brain structures beyond auditory cortex may facilitate the discrimination of these temporal features. As part of my postdoctoral research at Stanford, I am examining this question with research funded by a postdoctoral NRSA from NIH/NIDCD. I am collecting fMRI data while unimpaired adults attend to both slow and rapid speech features as a means of identifying brain structures that accurately discriminate temporal information within these two time ranges. Results will provide new information regarding extended brain networks that facilitate the discrimination of slow and fast temporal features of speech, and may provide clues as to why it is advantageous for the auditory system to route this temporal information in an asymmetric manner. Importantly, I plan to use this novel experimental design for examining individuals with RD to gain a deeper understanding of the brain networks underlying impaired temporal processing in the RD auditory system.
The Neural Basis of Phonological Processing and Speaker Identity in the Autistic Brain: Impaired phonological processing and abnormal perception of human voice are two critical, yet understudied, aspects of language and social impairments in children with ASD. Despite the prevalence and adverse impact of these deficits, the brain mechanisms underlying these phenomena have received surprisingly little experimental investigation, particularly in children with ASD. I have initiated a study to further our understanding of basic auditory function underlying decoding of phonological content (what is being said) and speaker identity (who is saying it) in children with ASD, compared to typically developing children matched on age and language ability. This study is funded with an R21 from NIH/NIDCD that I co-wrote with my postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Vinod Menon.
Publications
- Inter-subject synchronization of brain responses during natural music listening European Journal of Neuroscience. 2013
- Multivariate activation and connectivity patterns discriminate speech intelligibility in Wernickes, Brocas, and Geschwinds areas Cerebral Cortex. 2012
- Neurobiological Underpinnings of Math and Reading Learning Disabilities Journal of Learning Disabilities. 2012
- A possible role for a paralemniscal auditory pathway in the coding of slow temporal information. Hear Res. 2011; (1-2): 125-34
- Decoding temporal structure in music and speech relies on shared brain resources but elicits different fine-scale spatial patterns. Cereb Cortex. 2011; (7): 1507-18
- Inferior colliculus contributions to phase encoding of stop consonants in an animal model. Hear Res. 2011; (1-2): 108-18
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